OVERLAND 191
ISBN 978-0-9775171-8-3
winter 2008
published 23 May 2008

If the ‘history wars’ dominated the Howard era, how will Kevin Rudd confront the past?

Overland 191 looks both backwards and forwards to examine how our history shapes our future.

In ‘The Clever Principle of Similar Difference’, Kathleen Weekley relates Ruddism to the ‘passive revolution’ conducted during eleven years of conservative government. Australia is not now what it once was, and real change, she contends, requires a fundamentally different approach.

Anna Clark turns to a fresh source for answers about history in schools – the students themselves. School kids, she finds, don’t want a nationalist history: as one interviewee says, “it’s so boring and I can’t stand it”.

Sean Scalmer traces the evolution of ‘short histories’ of Australia and finds, rather than an agreed narrative, a constant process of reinvention.

In a beautifully crafted memoir, novelist Saskia Beudel reveals how the Australian desert records its own past in the subtle beauty of native grasses.

Jeremy Fisher tells his own story of a pivotal moment in Australian social history: the emergence of Gay Liberation.

“Superheroes are figures of transformation – capable of turning to fire or ice or steel – and, as they leave the page, they are again transformed.” In an essay that blends fandom and scholarship, Martyn Pedler chronicles the mainstreaming of caped crusaders and other comic strip heroes.

Former Overland editor Nathan Hollier traces the intersection of post-modernism and the free market in contemporary literary culture while Brian Musgrove looks at the politicisation of aesthetics in Australian political culture.

Plus stories from Philip Nielsen, Tim Richards, Lizzy Edwards and Stuart Cooke, another winning poem from the Overland magazine Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, reviews, correspondence and more.

Enquiries to Jeff Sparrow on 03 9919 4163 or
email overland@vu.edu.au or jeff.sparrow@vu.edu.au

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